From Freeman's site: "Flock is a full evening performance work for saxophone quartet, conceived to directly engage audiences in the composition of music by physically bringing them out of their seats and enfolding them into the creative process. During the performance, the four musicians and 60-80 audience members move freely around the performance space. A computer vision system determines the locations of the audience members and musicians, and it uses that data to generate performance instructions for the saxophonists, who view them on wireless handheld displays mounted on their instruments. The data is also artistically rendered and projected on multiple video screens to provide a visual experience of the score."

Opening is 6pm-9pm and we’ll have a performance at 8pm of high-voltage spark/noise by Arcangel and 8bit shoegaze by Tree Wave. Also we’re doing this JODI show in conjunction with VertexList in NY who will be having their opening simultaneously, and we’ll have a live webcam link between the two openings. Should be a lot of fun, come check it out.

[...] Rough Mix [Quicktime .mov] features [Rick] Silva outdoors with his DJ mixing board doing turntablist moves on rocks, leaves, snow, sand, water: "scratching nature" if you will, treating the landscape as a series of imaginary vinyl LPs to be mixed. In his talk Silva discussed the importance of the hand and touch to the DJ, and here it's as if he's lost nature and is desperately (joyfully?) reconnecting with it by clawing, patting, swiping, rubbing, and scattering it. These seem like the actions of a crazy man since he has no turntables, only an unplugged board resting on various surfaces in the middle of nowhere (a gorgeous mountain landscape), but the piece makes it funny rather than alarming.

Aside from the obsessive performance aspect of it, the work thrills through its use of high-def cinematography but especially through its state-of-the-art collage of electronic sounds. One of Rough Mix's paradoxes is that turntablism is an "analog art" and the piece is about connecting with nature yet the sounds and images are quite distinctively digitally realized, that is, artificial. The abstract "music concrete" recalls urban dance music but densely filtered and "glitched"--imagine skipping CDs reverberating in a dreamy aural haze with the occasional hip hop beat cutting in and out. The timing pulls it together: the piece is long but the quick editing of the music in sync with closeups of Silva's scratching hand, spinning geosat views of the land, and the "surprise factor" of never quite knowing where the mixing board will turn up in the ecstatically empty, Western terrain, keeps you engaged. The DJ is the focal point, a crossing point of the real and the digitally mapped.

The North of England is increasingly regarded as the center of British new media art. Condensed within Cumbria, Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, and Yorkshire is a range of extremely prolific artists and organizations which the UK's London-centric art press often ignores. However, with an unprecedented level of new media art events starting this May under the umbrella of four key events, some of those hacks might actually have to venture north of Watford Gap. Futuresonic will celebrate the 40th anniversary of multimedia hitting the dance floor during Britain's Psychedelic Spring/ Summer and includes over 30 events with more than 100 acts and artists from around the world. The 12th Lovebytes Festival will present 48 events across the city with 13 live performances including one by Fluxus artist Yasunao Tone. Now in its 6th year, Evolution will offer an immense program of experimental film, sound, and visual art programmed by Lumen --with 11 UK premieres. And finally, Dott 07 will be exhibiting artists including United Visual Artists (UVA), Aether Architects, and Golan Levin with 'Ghost Pole Propagator,' his interactive ghost installation which will be eerily projected onto castle walls. The season is being grandly described as the 'coming of age of digital art' and with each of the regions involved demonstrating their past and future links to all things digital, it will strengthen the bond between new media and the North. - Charlotte Frost

The Mobilized! conference is this weekend Saturday, May 5th and
Sunday May 6th. Mobilized! is event that focuses on mobile
communications media practices and technologies and the ways they are
rapidly changing public space and social interaction.

CUNYcolab, The Center for Social Media at American University, and a
group of university programs doing work in digital media have joined
to sponsor an event that brings together people making mobile media,
designing software, and using mobile and locative technologies.

Mobilized! is an ‘unconference’ where content is driven and created
by a convergence of students, designers, artists, scholars,
activists, and media professionals in the spirit of the open source
movement.

Mobilized! – a chance to look at what people are doing with mobile
media, a chance to find out how to do it yourself, and a moment to
reflect on the social significance of these practices.

Mobilized! will feature:

* A kickoff event with keynote by Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of
The Anarchist in the Library.

A showcase of student, artist, community and new business
projects and mobile video and project awards.

Workshops focused on creating platforms and projects on mobile
devices including new tools like Python, Java Micro Edition (J2ME),
Microsoft’s .NET Mobile Edition, Flash Lite, Google Maps and Mobile,
Mobile Processing, and a look at how they are being used in areas
from open source telephony and mobile video blogging, to mobile
gaming and locative urbanism with noted designers, programmers and
artists.

NYU's ITP department runs a highly-regarded new media art graduate program in which the students meld immersion into deep media theory with intense hands-on programming and design. The art produced in the program tends to be socially- and form-conscious, and is often quite entertaining. In fact, the otherwise 'serious' department sometimes describes its huge East Village loft as a 'funhouse' and it certainly looks like one at the end of each semester, when the best student projects are put on display. On May 8th and 9th, the space will be overrun by projects ranging from low-bit music and video to eco-friendly installations. There will even be a pair of robots spewing celebrity gossip! Highlights include Lumen, an artificial bioluminescent deep sea creature displayed in consideration of unseen and alternative energy sources; Experimental Devices for Performance, Andrew Schneider's series of wearable prosthesis meant to augment performances; and News Brews, Benjamin Brown's 'hack' of taste receptor-systems to evaluate public 'taste' for news about certain world regions, which in turn brews coffee plucked from those parts of the world. While Zach Layton and Jeff Sable consider the topology of sound, Tristan Perich's 1-bit sound and video series find abstract beauty in the complex simplicity of signals. Visitors can also sink their teeth into Michael Ang's comparison of human and insect aesthetics, and whet their appetite for future projects by reviewing the trailers for Kati London's thesis project, an upcoming festival of artists' consumer-related interventions. The show's website thoroughly documents the many projects that will be on display, and the cumulative impression is one of the ITP show as a touchstone for innovation and new artistic currents. - James Petrie